Are Your Pinnable Images Hurting Your Site?3 min read

Lately, especially since the explosion of sites like Pinterest and Instagram, the web has become more and more focused on images. For content to go “viral” on Pinterest or pretty much on any other social network, images are usually involved. But, are those pinnable images hurting the performance and in-turn your site’s ranking on Google? Could those images be causing you to lose readers or potential customers?

I have mad skills in the kitchen but when it comes to the really complex backend stuff of WordPress or coding, not so much. I thought it would be best to get guidance from an expert on this topic. In the episode of the podcast, I chat with Dustin Hartzler from YourWebsiteEngineer.com about the things we can do to keep our beautiful, pinnable images, but at the same time keep them from hurting our site and possibly our ranking.

http://podcast.musicradiocreative.com/

Dustin is a really awesome guy who knows his stuff. He was kind enough to give us this summary about the things we should keep in mind when using images on our sites as well as links to helpful plug-ins and resources.

Reasons for optimizing your web images:

Bandwidth and throughput: We all know that bandwidth has been a buzzword for many years now, and getting your web documents to render as fast as possible in users’ browsers means keeping your graphic and image file size to a minimum. The challenge becomes maintaining a high quality graphic while keeping a lean file size; the balance of these two elements is key to optimizing your web images.

Data storage and space: While data storage space and servers become less expensive every year, it is still prudent to limit your image size.

Reduced costs: Optimized images add up to less server and storage space requirements, less bandwidth and throughput requirements, and therefore reduced hosting costs

User experience: The visitor enjoys a better experience when page load times are minimal.

What to consider to when you’re using images

Right size the images

Crop the image to make it the right size

Save it at 72 dpi

WordPress Tip: If you are in a pinch, you can go and change the settings inside your WordPress media area

About ohsopinteresting

Cynthia Sanchez is a Pinterest marketing consultant and expert. Cynthia created OhSoPinteresting.com, one of the early leaders in Pinterest education for businesses. Contact Cynthia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cynthiasanchezrnbsn

As a user, not a blogger or business, I’ve noticed that when I use Google images to find the origin of an image, often the first page of hits are Pinterest boards. These have frequently been repins and still do not take me to the original. I’m usually pretty persistent, but have found this happens more frequently.

depending on what the image is and what you’re wanting it to represent, adding text might be a good idea. I know you posts are full of great information that might be hard to communicate through an image adding a bit of text would help. Remember to make them tall rather than wide to fill in more of the Pinterest real estate.

Nope, 72 dpi is for the recommended resolution for images used within your blog posts. I try to keep all of the images I use here at that level and so far, I haven’t had any problems with them no matter what if I’m on my phone or computer. Since these are not meant to be enlarged or printed it works pretty well.

In Photoshop it’s easy to set the resolution to 72 dpi when opening a new project and in PickMonkey I choose the middle quality level when saving my images.

Darlene, “72dpi” is a very arbitrary number. If you made a picture of a ruler and put a black mark at every 72nd pixel, then held a ruler to your monitor with it at full size, chances are an “inch” on the image would be between 2/3 and 1/2 the size of a real one. Because modern monitors have so many more pixels. Browsers just had to have some kind of a convention, so they went with a measurement from printing days: a point, which is 1/72 of an inch. That’s why typefaces are gauged in points. It’s also why the first Mac had a screen resolution of 72dpi (which was horrible).

Many people can get away with very small file sizes on their sites but as a photographer it often pays to have better resolution. This slows the site but also shows more closely what the original photo looks like. WE run the gamut of having to show good resolution and keeping site visitors happy. Always a hard thing to do.

I can understand your dilemma. It must be a tough decision for a photographer to make when you’re trying to showcase the quality of your work. Especially when you have such beautiful images like yours.

I really enjoyed your article about Pinterest by the way 🙂

Thanks so much for your feedback.

Jan

April 3, 2013 at 2:40 pm

Thanks Cynthia and Dustin, for bringing so much information to light in this important podcast! Photo resolution can be an overwhelming concept to grasp!

Since finding your pin re: image-sourcing to clean up our Pinterest boards, i click through (a lot more often, anyway!) before i re-pin. If the external site takes too long to load (or is otherwise undesirable) it likely wont make it to any of my boards!

Looking forward to more about image links and their Google results, etc. on your upcoming blog post.